I've known about Touhou, and it's crazily large fan-following for quite a few years now, but I've yet to really consider playing any of the games until late 2017, when the first official Touhou game came to Steam to a fantastic reaction, placing it in the top 25 games on Steam (according to my algorithms) despite lacking an English language option. Shortly after that came flowing the fan-games, of which there are far more than the official ones, ranging from supposedly great quality games to, honestly, crap. I've added a few of those to my backlog, and I just now got around to playing the first one.
Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity is a (mostly) top-down hack-and-slash bullet hell. There's about a dozen stages, each ending with a boss fight, also about a dozen different abilities, of which 3 can be slotted at a time, a not-particularly-meaningful level system, and some amount of different equipment, which just boosts your stats. Overall the entire thing takes maybe 4-5 hours, there's an optional end-game dungeon I did not play very far, and you can play the same game from a slightly different point of view with another character, swapping out your attacks and abilities (but all the enemies and levels stay the same).
Going into it, the first thing that struck me were the... inconsistent graphics. Particularly, the models, animations, and especially the UI seemed kind of amateurish or simple, while the visual effects and post-processing were really effective. These discrepancies often indicate a poor quality game, so my hopes fell low right at the start. However, to my surprise, the combat felt really good, and definitely outclassed even many bigger action games with how well it flowed. Sadly, after the initial roller coaster of a down and an up, the rest was a slow descent.
For one, the game was way too easy. There was a "bullet hell" mode with a warning sign in the options, which I turned on after the first 10 minutes, fearing I might have made it too difficult. However, with the exception of boss fights, which were of just the right difficulty, everything else was a dead-easy grind. It didn't help that I didn't get many more options or ways to play this. However good the combat felt, it got monotonous as I just mashed attack and one or two abilities against all enemies. For better or worse, it was over before it really started to bore me, making for a rather short experience.
Good combat, short runtime, little content, kind of repetitive, too easy, but really, good combat.
So my verdict on this is unsure. Is it a good game? I'd incline towards "no". Did I enjoy the brief time I spent on it? "Mostly." So would I recommend it? "I guess if you're particularly a fan of hack-and-slash and/or bullet hell and/or Touhou games."
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